The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?—the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle—as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

  Touch is the most intimate sense of all. The whole sensitive skin is played upon, the whole body, braced, resistant, poised, relaxed, answers to the thrust of forces incomparably stronger than itself. Cold spring water stings the palate, the throat tingles unbearably; cold air smacks the back of the mouth, the lungs crackle. Wind blows a nostril in, one breathes on one side only, the cheek is flattened against the gum, the breath comes gaspingly, as in a fish taken from water—man is not in his element in air that moves at this velocity. Frost stiffens the muscles of the chin, mist is clammy on the cheek, after rain I run my hand through juniper or birches for the joy of the wet drops trickling over the palm, or walk through long heather to feel its wetness on my naked legs.

  The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. When I was a girl, a charming old gentlewoman said something to me that I have never forgotten. I was visiting her country home, and after lunch, going for a walk with her niece, I picked up my gloves from the hall table where I had laid them down. She took them from me and laid them back on the table. ‘You don’t need these. A lot of strength comes to us through the hands.’ Sensation also. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers, the delicate tickle of a crawling caterpillar, the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind—nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye.

  And for the foot as well. Walking barefoot has gone out of fashion since Jeanie Deans trudged to London, but no country child grows up without its benediction. Sensible people are reviving the habit. They tell me a tale up here of a gentleman in one of the shooting lodges who went to the hill barefoot: when he sat down for lunch the beaters crowded as near as they dared to see what manner of soles such a prodigy could have. But actually walking barefoot upon heather is not so grim as it sounds. I have covered odd miles myself here and there in this fashion. It begins with a burn that must be forded: once my shoes are off, I am loth to put them on again. If there are grassy flats beside my burn, I walk on over them, rejoicing in the feel of the grass to my feet; and when the grass gives place to heather, I walk on still. By setting the foot sideways to the growth of the heather, and pressing the sprays down, one can walk easily enough. Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth. And a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment.

  In fording a swollen stream, one’s strongest sensation is of the pouring strength of the water against one’s limbs; the effort to poise the body against it gives significance to this simple act of walking through running water. Early in the season the water may be so cold that one has no sensation except of cold; the whole being retracts itself, uses all its resources to endure this icy delight. But in heat the freshness of the water slides over the skin like shadow. The whole skin has this delightful sensitivity; it feels the sun, it feels the wind running inside one’s garment, it feels water closing on it as one slips under—the catch in the breath, like a wave held back, the glow that releases one’s entire cosmos, running to the ends of the body as the spent wave runs out upon the sand. This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back.

  TWELVE

  Being

  Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience. This is the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.

  So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow—the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in. If I had other senses, there are other things I should know. It is nonsense to suppose, when I have perceived the exquisite division of running water, or a flower, that my separate senses can make, that there would be nothing more to perceive were we but endowed with other modes of perception. How could we imagine flavour, or perfume, without the senses of taste and smell? They are completely unimaginable. There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them. Yet, with what we have, what wealth! I add to it each time I go to the mountain—the eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses. It is an experience that grows; undistinguished days add their part, and now and then, unpredictable and unforgettable, come the hours when heaven and earth fall away and one sees a new creation. The many details—a stroke here, a stroke there—come for a moment into perfect focus, and one can read at last the word that has been from the beginning.

  These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood. They come to me most often, as I have indicated, waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song, and most of all after hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the ‘still centre’ of being. In some such way I suppose the controlled breathing of the Yogi must operate. Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.

  It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.

  So I have found what I set out to find. I set out on my journey in pure love. It began in childhood, when the stormy violet of a gully on the back of Sgoran Dubh, at which I used to gaze from a shoulder of the Monadhliaths, haunted my dreams. That gully, with its floating, its almost tangible ultramarine, thirled me for life to the mountain. Climbing Cairngorms was then for me a legendary task, which heroes, not men, accomplished. Certainly not children. It was still legendary on the October day, blue, cold and brilliant after heavy snow, when I climbed Creag Dhubh above Loch
an Eilein, alone and expectant. I climbed like a child stealing apples, with a fearful look behind. The Cairngorms were forbidden country—this was the nearest I had come to them; I was delectably excited. But how near to them I was coming I could not guess, as I toiled up the last slope and came out above Glen Einich. Then I gulped the frosty air—I could not contain myself, I jumped up and down, I laughed and shouted. There was the whole plateau, glittering white, within reach of my fingers, an immaculate vision, sun-struck, lifting against a sky of dazzling blue. I drank and drank. I have not yet done drinking that draught. From that hour I belonged to the Cairngorms, though—for several reasons—it was a number of years until I climbed them.

  So my journey into an experience began. It was a journey always for fun, with no motive beyond that I wanted it. But at first I was seeking only sensuous gratification—the sensation of height, the sensation of movement, the sensation of speed, the sensation of distance, the sensation of effort, the sensation of ease: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect upon me, as puss caresses not the man but herself against the man’s trouser leg. But as I grew older, and less self-sufficient, I began to discover the mountain in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its waters and rock, flowers and birds. This process has taken many years, and is not yet complete. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

  I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.

  AFTERWORD

  A BED. A BOOK. A MOUNTAIN.

  by Jeanette Winterson

  I am lying in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate.

  Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else.

  There is no substitute for reading.

  To go back to the book.

  Nan Shepherd never married and never lived anywhere but her native Scotland in a village at the foot of the Cairngorms. She was well educated and well travelled, but she always came home. She loved the Cairngorms. She wrote, ‘The mind cannot carry away all it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’

  I am not a mountain climber or even a hillwalker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it. A book is a door; on the other side is somewhere else.

  I found myself wandering the mountain range in the company of Nan Shepherd. She is dead, but that doesn’t make any difference. Her voice is as clear and fast-flowing as the streams she follows to their source, only to find that the source always points inwards, further. There is always further to go.

  I like it that I can lie in bed and read a book about mountain climbing. There are two dominant modes of experience offered to us at present – actual (hence our appetite for reality TV, documentaries and ‘true-life’ drama) and virtual – the Web. Sometimes these come together, as in the bizarre concept of Facebook: relationships without the relating.

  Reading offers something else: an imaginative world.

  I don’t want to confuse this with fantasy or escapism. For me, the imaginative world is the total world, not a world shredded and packed into compartments. For the poet Wordsworth, the job of the poet and the poem is to ‘see into the life of things’.

  This cannot be done if we are only separating. Imagination allows us to experience ourselves and our world as something that is relational and interdependent. Everything exists in relation to everything else. The reason that The Living Mountain is a ‘good’ book is that it takes a very particular and tiny subject and finds in it, or pulls out of it, a story about how we can understand the world.

  The book is a metaphor, yes, but it is also specifically about the Cairngorms. The opening it makes in the mind is its capacity to connect the specific and the local with the universal (and as Robert Macfarlane points out in his lovely introduction, the universal is not the same as the general).

  A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book nearly so well. A book lets you follow a writer’s mind. Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does. Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in ‘good’ books that is irrelevant. We don’t remember the books that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it. Memory is talismanic. We hold on to what we need and let the rest go. Just as in our own lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.

  Linear time is exhausting. Life has never been more rushed. This present way of being is not a truth about life or a truth about time; it is propositional. We can disagree.

  Part of Nan Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the mountain is to stop rushing to the top of the various plateaus of the Cairngorms. At first it is all about the exhilaration of the ascent. How far can she go? How fast? Then she starts circling like a dog with a good nose. She finds that she wants to be in the mountains. ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain, as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’

  To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time. I don’t think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime. The total time of a book is more like up time than downtime, in the way that salmon swim upstream to get home.

  We have lost all sense of home – whether it’s the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.

  How can a book get me home? It reminds me of where home is – by which I mean I am remapped by the book. My internal geography shifts, my values shift. I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am.

  The remapping is sometimes overwhelming – the wow factor of those books that we know have changed our territory – but usually it is much more subtle, and more of a reorienting. I feel settled in myself. To put it another way, I am a settler in myself. I inhabit my own space.

  I had a rough childhood. I left home at sixteen and for the next ten years physical home was a provisional space, not permanent, rarely secure. During that time I discovered that books gave me a way of being at home in myself. They provided a shining centre – and if that sounds a bit mystical, I suppose it is, but we all have to find a way of being, a way of living, and as far as I’m concerned, life has an inside as well as an outside. Most, if not all, of our time and energy goes into life on the outside – jobs, money, status, getting and spending – and this is disorientating. And it means that if life on the outside is a mess, as it often is, or unsatisfactory, we have no inner resources to help us through.

  Books work from the inside out. They are a private conversation happening somewhere in the soul.

  Often then, still, now, if I can use the book as a compass I can right my way. Reading calms me and it clears my head. In the company of a book my mind expands and I find myself less anxious and more aware.

 
This happens in the interaction between me and any, every encounter with a book that has being. And a book that has being is a book where the writer has found something essential and can communicate it to me.

  It really doesn’t matter what. The Cairngorms or Wuthering Heights. Cloud Atlas or Moby-Dick. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or a Carol Ann Duffy poem. Poetry is all about being, and because we are much less concerned with the subject matter or the story of a poem, it is easier to understand Susan Sontag’s remark, ‘A work of art is not just about something; it is something.’

  The is-ness of art, its being, is vital. What it is about may be interesting and absorbing, may be topical, may be urgent, but over time what comes back to us, sustains us, is none of that. Art, and that includes writing, is not an end in itself; it is a medium for the soul.

  You need not believe in the gods to believe in your own soul. It is that part of you that feels not obliged to materiality. I do not know if the soul survives physical death – and I do not care – but I know that to lose your soul while you are alive is worse than death.

  I want to protect my soul.

  Reading isn’t the only way to protect your soul, or to live in total time, or to find your own way home – but we’re talking about reading here, and my most intense experience is with and through language. I am like Adam and I need to name things. This is not taxonomy and it’s not reductive, rather it’s trying to find a language that fits. Fits what? Not only the object or the experience but also the feeling.

  It is impossible to have a thought without a feeling. Impossible not to feel. You can suppress and distort your feelings, you can displace them and be honest about them, but like it or don’t like it, you are feeling something every second. Nothing mystical here. In the economy of the body, the limbic pathway takes precedence over the neural highway. We are designed and built to feel.